My (new) Favourite

The topic for Sunday Funday blog this week is “Your Favourite Maths Task/Lesson/Activity”. I have shared many of my favourite tasks on other blog posts so I wasn’t sure what else I could write about. However, I then realised that I have a new favourite activity that I have tweeted about.

So here it is: Team Post-Its

I first saw the idea for this activity on this tweet:

https://twitter.com/mrallanmaths/status/877997106480517120

I loved the way that it allowed for lots of practice and provided opportunities for pupils to work together collaboratively. I also thought that it was great that pupils could look at the other answers posted and see how they compare to their answer. It provided a great self-checking mechanism.

The first time I used this activity was with my Higher class when solving polynomial equations. Pupils completed their working on mini whiteboards then put the solutions on the post its up under the question. Each team had a different colour of post it so that I could see exactly which team had correctly answered each question. [Note to self – get more variety of coloured post its as I had to give my nice arrow post its to one group].

The pupils were so engaged with this task. They enjoyed being able to compare their answers with others. If they found they had a different answer to a group they told the other group and discussed who had made a mistake. This led to some great conversations.

I repeated this activity with the same class the following week when finding the intersection of  polynomials.

I am hoping to use this activity with my other classes over the next year.  It has been incredibly successful so far.